Amanda Lawrence is one of our finest comic actresses. A generation ago
she would have had her own television series, but today, when even
merely pretty actors are professionally damned for not being beautiful,
she is restricted to occasional character roles. Still, the screen’s
loss is the stage’s gain, even if the stage is as intimate as that of
the Recreation Room at BAC.

Lawrence only has to put on a pair of round spectacles and pull a face
of mild distaste and she becomes Charles Hawtrey, one of the most
beloved of the actors from the Carry
On series of comedy films of the 1950s–70s. But her solo show,
rather than being a simple re-creation and tribute, examines the gap
between the amiable screen persona and the embittered, alcoholic man
behind it. Hawtrey seldom either got a square deal or appreciated what
he did get. From his early decision to change his name from Hartree and
encourage the notion that he was the son of actor-manager Sir Charles
Hawtrey, to typecasting in Will Hay films, a number of lean years
during which he turned to drink for solace, and further stereotyping in
the Carry Ons as well as
being criminally underpaid, through a series of homosexual scandals
including a fire at his home in Deal, Kent, when his teenage lover was
in bed with him, the oppression of life with his mother who declined
from pushy, vulgar, penny-pinching stage-mum into senile dementia, to
his death because he refused to allow his legs to be amputated to save
him from smoking-related gangrene, Hawtrey’s was anything but a life of
fairy-tale stardom.

Lawrence plays some 50-odd (sometimes very odd) parts in the 80-minute
show, making a comic virtue out of rushing from one seat to another to
take all three parts in a conversation or using ridiculous props such
as a panto version of a marshal’s hat and a supermarket trolley to
impersonate Laurence Olivier being driven in his Rolls-Royce to play
the Duke of Wellington on a neighbouring studio lot to Hawtrey. It is a
testimony to her skill, and that of director Paul Hunter, that she
strikes such an astute balance between humour and poignancy, never
mining the former nor yet falling into tears-of-a-clown cliché.